


Turning

by inamorata_jones



Series: Confessional [2]
Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-01-12 15:25:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18449345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inamorata_jones/pseuds/inamorata_jones
Summary: Post-6x10. Elizabeth makes her confession.





	1. Chapter 1

When she pulls open the door and sees him there, chained to a metal folding chair in the basement cell they’ve dragged him to at her request, she thinks her knees might give out. He looks hollowed out. Old. He’s looked like that since she put him here, if she’s honest about it, but she hasn’t really wanted to acknowledge it until now.

“Hey, Red,” she says, stepping inside. Her voice is a bare thread. _Get it together, Liz._

 “Lizzie.” He blinks up at her uncertainly, then visibly reaches for something like cheer. “Not that I don’t enjoy your visits, sweetheart, but if you’re going to get me out of bed at three a.m., can you find a less depressing spot for a meeting? The cafeteria worked just fine last time, didn’t it?”

 She takes five quick steps across the room and kneels at his feet, resisting the sudden, stupid impulse to lean her forehead against his knees and beg, or weep. She slides her lockpicks from her sleeve instead, and gets to work, grateful her hands are still steady. “We don’t have a lot of time,” she tells him.

When she’s dealt with the cuffs, she stands and takes a deliberate step back.

“Elizabeth. What are you planning?”

It takes everything she has just to look at him. “I need to . . . explain something, Red, and then you need to decide what to do, and then you need to go. Okay?”

She watches the muscle under his left eye twitch. Takes a breath. He knows, she’s sure, but she still has to say it.

“It was me. I’m the one who got you arrested. After the UN, I wanted to call it off, but Jennifer said it was the only way we’d know. Who you were, why you’d stolen our father’s name. I went along with it. I was still angry at you—for Tom, for . . . a lot of things—and it seemed important. I thought if I confronted you with it, you might stop lying to me all the time.”

“But getting me killed turned out to be easier, did it?” he asks, sounding as perfectly, politely uninterested as if she’s a stranger telling him her life story at a bus stop.

 She _hates_ that tone. “I didn’t mean for it to get this far. I thought you’d find a way out after a few weeks. That Cooper would get you out.”

 “No, you never mean it, do you, Agent Keen?”

 “Red—”

“So tell me,” he interrupts. “That little scene in the courtroom yesterday. The testimony you were so anxious to give on my behalf. Were you softening me up for this conversation, or just trying to salve your conscience before they sent me to my death?”

“Neither. You can be a good man. You’re good to me. I wanted them to know.”

He scoffs.

She glances up at the ceiling to try and stop the tears she has starting. They won’t convince him or help her. “Believe me or don’t. But I am sorry. And—I do love you.”

Nothing. His face has gone blank, his eyes bright and cold as sea glass.

Sighing, she reaches into her jacket for the gun she’s brought him—a Browning Hi-Power like the one he’d favoured while they were on the run—and holds it out to him, grip first. Her hands, she notes distantly, are trembling now. It’s too bad. She’d wanted to be strong.

“Go ahead,” she says, when he makes no immediate move to take it. “I know what you do to traitors.”

After a minute, he pulls it gently from her grasp, flicks the safety off and points it at her heart.

She’s prepared for this, but she still finds herself backing away from him instinctively, stopping with a jolt when her back hits the door. “Just make it quick, all right? Don’t fuck it up like you did with Mr. Kaplan. And when it’s done, go all the way down to the end of the hall, right, and out the door. We’ve disabled the alarms and paid off the guards. Dembe will be waiting for you, and there’ll be a cleanup crew coming to deal with . . ." She stops. Starts again. "Cooper’s got some kind of plan in motion to get the verdict invalidated—I made him promise to help you even if I didn’t come back—but you’ll have to lay low for a while.”

She waits for some sign he’s heard her, but gets none. “Don’t you dare blame Dembe,” she continues. “He was only doing what I asked. And look after Agnes, please—personally, if you’re able. I should have left her with you in the first place.”

Five seconds pass. Ten. Fifteen. He swallows audibly. She braces herself.

He lowers the gun, his mouth twisting in an approximation of a smile. His eyes are wet. “My little Judas,” he murmurs in a voice gone all the way to gravel. “I’m not going to kill you. But I never want to see your face again.”

She nods shakily. “I’ll fly away,” she tells him, echoing the promise he’d made her years ago. “And you’d better too—quickly. But—”

She closes the distance between them in the space of a breath, throwing her arms around him and leaning in to press a kiss to his forehead. He stays utterly still. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll make sure Dembe can tell you how to reach me, just—just in case.”

 

Even twitching with adrenaline and blinded by tears as she is, she manages to make it out of the cell, out of the building, home. Later, she won’t remember how.

 

She leaves the task force, collects Agnes from Scottie’s, and moves out of the country for a time. She does give Dembe a number to call before she goes. Reddington—the man who called himself Reddington—never uses it.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

His days in Ravello are quiet. He gets up early most mornings, reads for a while, then spends an hour or so at tai chi. Two or three days a week, he takes lunch at the neighbourhood trattoria, whose owner, an ancient black-eyed woman named Sophia, has taken a shine to him. He teaches those afternoons—piano to the local kids, English to their mothers—and spends the others dealing with the few parts of his business he hasn’t sold or handed off. In the evenings, if the weather and his condition permit, he goes down to the beach at Castiglione, or does a few laps in his little backyard pool.

Someone will track him here eventually, but that doesn’t worry him. He’s already lived longer than he thought he would, and it’s been such a relief to settle in somewhere at last. He likes this place—its brightly-coloured houses, its extravagant gardens, the calm mood of its old cathedral. Likes his neighbours, whose quiet sympathy for Niccolo, the American son of an Italian mother who’s returned to his ancestral homeland after the death of his wife and a catastrophic falling-out with his daughter, is a comfort. Likes his house, with its view of the sea from the east terrace and its cheerful majolica tiles, the colour of that same sea on a July afternoon, inside.

As peaceful as it is, exile does get lonely. He’s always glad when Dembe comes. And late in the year, as the weather goes damp and gloomy and his thoughts slide toward Christmas, the younger man’s company is especially welcome.

Dembe finally blows in with a wicked rainstorm on the 18th of December, bearing the ingredients for mullah robe and a bottle of very good red. He’s two days later than scheduled.

“Trouble?” the man who was Reddington asks, once they’re settled in front of the fire with their goblets of mulled cider.

“No, brother,” Dembe assures him, calm and slow. “No trouble. Just a bit of family business.”

 

It’s not until the next afternoon that he finds out what that means. Dembe banishes him to the study, claiming the stew won’t taste right if the kitchen is too crowded while it’s made. He goes, rolling his eyes, but pauses in the doorway of the study. There’s a laptop on his desk, with a red envelope and a flash drive sitting on top it.

“Dembe, what the hell is this?”

“The file first, then the card,” Dembe calls back. “Then we will talk.”

Sighing, he sits down, flips open the machine, and plugs in the drive. He knows there’s no arguing with that tone.

The video starts automatically, startling him. There are a few seconds of blur, then the camera focuses on a young girl’s face. For a moment he thinks, staring at her wide blue eyes and gently curling hair, that he’s looking at Masha, but her jaw is too narrow and her nose a bit too wide. Agnes, he realizes.

The camera drops, blurs again, and refocuses on the photo album she has open in her lap. He sees himself—younger, healthier, smiling. He doesn’t recognize the shot, but knows from the light in his eyes that he must have been watching Elizabeth when it was taken.

“I know you know this,” Elizabeth herself says from offscreen, “but tell me again who that is?"

“That’s Uncle Nicholas,” Agnes says, enunciating each syllable of his name carefully. “But we call him Red. He made the hiding place to keep us safe when I was real little. And he made my cuckoo clock.”

“And that clock still chimes, doesn’t it?” The camera shifts back to Agnes’ face. “What does it sound like?”

Giggling, Agnes imitates the sound of the chime, then sobers. “You miss Uncle Red, don’t you, Mama?”

“Yeah, sweet pea. I do. It would be nice to see him.”

“Don’t be _sad_ , Mama—just tell him to come for Christmas!”

There’s a pause. “I guess I could,” Elizabeth says. “But he might listen better if you tell him. Can you do that?”

“Uh …”

“I mean, tell him on the video. Uncle Dembe will make sure he sees it.”

“Ohhh.” Agnes sits up straighter and clears her throat officiously. “Uncle Red,” she asks very, very seriously, “will you please come for Christmas?”

With a choked laugh from Elizabeth, the video ends. He sits staring at the blank screen for a moment, then reaches numbly for the envelope. The writing on it, a shaky block-letter “RED” and a malformed heart, is obviously Agnes’, but it’s Elizabeth, of course, who’s penned the note inside.

 

_Dear Red:_

_Or Nicholas, I suppose. I know you said you didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and I guess you meant it, because you haven’t called, but I just wanted you to know that I miss you. We miss you.     And you can come home to us, if you want. Dembe knows the way._

_xo,_

_E_

He crumples the card and envelope in his fist, then smooths them automatically. He wants to punch someone, or break something. He wants to drop that drive on the floor and grind it to bits under his heel. Wants to watch that video about a dozen more times. He leans back in his chair, closing his eyes, and concentrates on slowing his breathing.

When he opens them again, Dembe is watching him from the doorway.

“I told you I was finished with her.”

“I know. But she needs her family. And you need yours.”

“ _You_ are my family. The only family I have.”

Dembe raises an eyebrow.

“She betrayed me. Not for the first time, I’ll remind you. And almost got me killed.”

“She made a mistake, Ray—Nicholas. And she did what she could to correct it.”

He smirks a little at the slip-up. “I don’t give a flying fuck.”

“You say that, but”—Dembe jerks his head, indicating the two closed doors across the hall—“you keep these rooms ready for them just the same. If Elizabeth walked in to hers tomorrow, she’d find the walls painted her favourite colour, her old quilt from Sam’s house on the bed, clothes her size in the closet. And the dollhouse you made for Agnes? Those glow-in-the-dark stars you put up just for her?”

The silence stretches. Dembe is right, of course, and he does want . . .

“Fine,” he says, exhausted. Relieved. “When do we leave?”

Dembe grins. “Tomorrow, if you like. Edward is standing by.”

           


End file.
